Picatinny Arsenal

Picatinny Arsenal is the Joint Center of Excellence for Armaments and Munitions, providing products and services to all branches of the U.S. military. Nestled in northern New Jersey, Picatinny specializes in the research, development, acquisition and lifecycle management of advanced conventional weapon systems and advanced ammunition.
ARDEC is a specialized research, development, and engineering center within the U.S. Army Material Command.

The Challenge

Picatinny Arsenal needed a way to analyze and improve the strength of vehicle armor, especially when subjected to blast waves.

Accurately simulate the impact of a grenade falling to the ground in the event of one being dropped accidently.

Dassault Systèmes Response

The Coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian (CEL) capability within Abaqus finite element analysis (FEA) enabled Picatinny’s engineers to simulate a fluid or gas interacting with the overhead cover add-on for the Objective Gunner Protection Kit.
U.S. Army engineers were able to use Abaqus/Explicit and XFEM technology to co-simulate fracture-failure in their grenade model to achieve their desired results.

Benefits

CEL analysis provided more realistic results than previous analyses, proving itself valuable in the design phase of new armor systems. It also enabled the analysis of more complex geometries previously impossible to solve accurately with more simplified methods.
By using SIMULIA’s Abaqus and co-simulation, the engineers were not only able to accurately simulate the grenade impact, but they dramatically reduced the required run time from 6 hours to just 10 minutes.